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One of our favorites, Tamar Jacoby, returns with "'Temporary is temporary' won't work for all immigrants":

...[an] unrealistic faction of Republicans, though willing to admit an extra 400,000 workers a year, is insisting that they stay only temporarily - that no matter how well they do in this country or what kind of roots they put down here, every single one of them must go home at the end of a three-year work stint... These Republicans' mantra is "temporary is temporary," and the reasoning behind it isn't entirely wrong... But what about the foreigners who do so well here — rising up the economic ladder, putting down roots and falling in love with the United States — that they want to settle permanently and, like generations of immigrants before them, become citizens? We need a system that can accommodate them too... One possible compromise: Allow foreign workers to enter on temporary visas, then use a point system [see: Chuck Hagel's scheme] to determine who can stay... Far better to admit an array of temporary workers, skilled and unskilled, and then after a few years use a point system to screen them for permanent visas: a system that rewards not just skill and education but hard work, job advancement, abiding by the law, learning English, putting down roots and investing in your community — the things we want to see in U.S. citizens... "Temporary is temporary" makes a good sound bite, but as a one-size-fits-all policy, it's not a workable answer. A system like that would deprive us of our most able, enterprising newcomers. Even worse, many of them probably would not go home when their work stints were done, but instead would burrow underground, creating another generation of illegal immigrants.

My response is in parable form: once upon a time there was a farmer named Farmer Bob, who decided to try some new seeds in his garden. He figured if they didn't work out, he could always dig them up and send them back, and he decided to decide which to send back based on the depths of their roots. The plants struggled as hard as they could to develop deep roots. Then came decision day. By that time, the plants had formed the National Council of The Plants, who held candlelight vigils fighting tooth and nail to prevent Farmer Bob from sending back even those plants who had turned out to be complete epiphytes. They complained about his criteria, they planted news stories about sympathetic plants, the plants even marched through his field demanding amnesty! Eventually Farmer Bob just threw up his arms and decided to let them all stay. Boy was he angry at the seed saleswoman who'd sold him that bill of goods!

Nowadays, Farmer Bob wishes he'd read her brochure more closely and had realized that it carried the seeds of its own destruction.

Comments

Make up any new words you like, Tamar. The answer is still NO. NO AMNESTY. None. Never again. No guest workers, touchbacks, pathways, regularization, temp Z, none. You seem to never tire of trying to find a new way to describe or foist a new description for amnesty on us, but it will never pass. It's been NO since we were first deceived in 1986, and it will be NO forever. Knock it off. Copy Oklahomas new enforcement plan if you like the word "comprehensive", and need something constructive to do with your time. Illegals in that State are already packing their bags.

_...use a point system to screen them for permanent visas: a system that rewards not just skill and education but hard work, job advancement, abiding by the law, learning English, putting down roots and investing in your community Â— the things we want to see in U.S. citizens._ Massive bureaucracies are, by definition, not designed to deal with such highly subjective criteria as "hard work", and "putting down roots and investing in your community". They need a set of fairly rigid rules to prevent the whole system from grinding to a halt. What Jacoby's proposal would devolve into ( and I think she knows this) would be a "rubber stamp"/"everybody gets a green card" fiasco granting permanent residence for all the "temporary" workers who are non-felons. One question I've yet to see discussed is how much the USCIS workforce will have to expand to handle all those millions of new applications for "regularization" and all the new "temporary" worker programs. USCIS is now completely incompetent in handling its CURRENT workload. For verification of this assertion see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010301618.html http://www.examiner.com/a-284749~Editorial__Fraud_goes_unchecked_as_foreigners_game_federal_immigration_system.html http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004706.htm

Then Farmer Bob tried to hire a thousand workers to help him take care of the weeds, rip up the bad ones and grow the good ones, but it took so many workers that he soon went bankrupt trying to pay them.